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World News Quick Take

■ Australia
Delegates fight it out
The fortunes of Australia's once-mighty Labor Party dipped further yesterday when an acrimonious state conference in Melbourne degenerated into a fist fight involving 40 delegates. A scuffle over voting procedures between warring left-wing and right-wing factions led to a melee in which right-left combinations were thrown. Party heavyweights led by member of parliament Stephen Conroy managed to end the brawl before there were serious injuries. "It's unacceptable behaviour by any delegate to resort to violence, and it will be stamped out," Conroy told reporters.

■ Japan
Top man quits over scandal
The chairman of Japan's top business daily has stepped down to prevent reports of an accounting scandal from tarnishing the company's image, the newspaper said yesterday. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun's board of directors accepted Takuhito Tsuruta's resignation and named him as an official advisor to the company on Friday. Two former employees had called on company auditors to sue the board for alleged accounting irregularities at TC Works Co, a wholly owned subsidiary, it said.

■ India
Minister gets the sack
A minister of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was dismissed yesterday in the wake of the murder of his alleged mistress. New Delhi Television reported that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati dismissed Amarmani Tripathi, the state minister for stamps and printing, following allegations that he had an affair with the murdered Hindi language poetess Madhumita Shukla. Shukla, 24, was found dead with bullet wounds on May 9 at her home in Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow. Her sister had alleged that Tripathi's wife was behind the killing as she was jealous of her husband's affair. Shukla, an unmarried woman, was pregnant at the time of murder.

■ India
Stolen baby returns home
A mother whose newborn boy was swapped for a girl, sparking a 3-week baby hunt, on Friday said she has forgiven the woman accused in the theft. "I want to forgive her and forget everything," Latha Reddy, the 19-year-old mother of the boy, said. The girl's mother, Mehmooda Begum, is facing arrest. Her husband Nazeer Ahmed and three hospital staff alleged to have arranged the swap have already been arrested. Reddy got back her 21-day-old son on Monday after a DNA test showed that the girl given to her by hospital authorities wasn't hers. Swapping of girl babies for boys and outright stealing of newborn boys from hospitals is sometimes reported in India.

■ Singapore
Toilet molester goes to jail
An odd-job laborer who molested a woman in a public toilet after falling on her from a false ceiling was jailed for more than five years and ordered to receive six strokes of the cane, it was reported yesterday. Lim Kwok Keng, 30, maintained his innocence despite being convicted of criminal trespass and molestation, The Straits Times said. He was arrested after molesting a 23-year-old clerk on March 6. The woman, was using a toilet on the sixth floor when Lim fell on her through a gap in the false ceiling. Lim, who defended himself, said he was in the ceiling looking for belongs he kept there. Police, however, found nothing.

■ Saudi Arabia
Fire in Mecca kills 14
A fire in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia has killed 14 people and injured 43 others, the official Saudi Press Agency reported Friday. The fire broke out late Thursday in a building housing 270 pilgrims. The agency quoted the director of civil defense for the Mecca region, Brigadier Ahmed bin Saad Al Thubaiti, as saying the fire was brought under control by members of the civil defense force. "Billowing smoke led to the death of 14 and the suffocation of 43 others," Al Thubaiti said, adding that "preliminary investigation showed that the fire was accidental."

■ United States
Democrats kill legislation
More than 50 Texas Democrats who were successful in killing legislation by taking the radical step of leaving the state were welcomed Friday on the steps of the state capitol. The state lawmakers arrived back in Austin before dawn Friday after four nights just over the border in Oklahoma. Their dramatic exodus put them out of the reach of Texas authorities who were dispatched to round them up and return them to Austin. But Texas state troopers were left standing on the sidelines in Oklahoma, where they had no authority to haul them in. They only boarded buses for the four-hour drive back to the state capital after the deadline passed at midnight Thursday for a vote on a bill that would have redrawn the borders of voting districts, which the opposition Democrats said the majority Republican Party had changed to its advantage.

■ The hague
Radic to face tribunal
Miroslav Radic, a war crimes suspect who eluded capture for years, was extradited yesterday to the UN tribunal in The Hague. The former Yugoslav Army captain is one of three suspects in a massacre of more than 250 Croats at a farm near the city of Vukovar in 1991. He surrendered to the Serbian police in mid-April. He flew on a regular passenger flight from Belgrade to Amsterdam, Serbian state television RTS reported.

■ Zimbabwe
Journalist expelled
The government forced a correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian aboard a flight to London late Friday, deporting him in defiance of repeated court orders. Before he was dragged aboard an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767, Andrew Meldrum called his wife, Dolores, and attorney Beatrice Mtetwa, and told them he had not been assaulted but had been taken, hooded, to Harare International Airport and held there incommunicado for 10 hours. Earlier, the concealment of his whereabouts from lawyers, colleagues and his wife aroused anxiety about his safety.

■ Mexico
Bookstore spurns author
A bookstore chain cancelled the opening of a new store after protests from Jewish community members against the scheduled appearance of Nobel laureate writer Jose Saramago, media reports said Friday. Reforma daily reported that Libreria Gandhi bookstore cancelled the opening of its new branch in Huixquilucan, set for Thursday, after receiving e-mail messages from the Jewish community members complaining about Saramago. Last year the Portuguese writer criticized Israel's military clampdown in occupied Palestinian territories saying it resembled the Holocaust.

■ France
Bus crash kills 28 tourists
Twenty-eight German tourists were killed and some 40 people were hurt when a coach they were traveling in veered off the road and crashed near the southeastern French city of Lyon in the early hours yesterday, rescue officials said. They said there were indications that the bus, which was headed for Spain with 78 people aboard, had been traveling too fast and was probably overtaking another vehicle when it went off the road. French officials activated an emergency plan after the crash, which occurred just before 5am, and a large team of rescue workers and doctors were working to extract casualties from the wreckage of the vehicle.

■ Germany
Avian flu sparks slaughter
German officials ordered the slaughter on Friday of 12,000 more chickens on farms close to the Dutch border in fear that H7, the avian flu that can infect humans, had spread. Nine birds on two farms in the Cleves district appeared sick, prompting an immediate kill order from the agriculture ministry of North Rhine Westphalia state. But laboratory tests of tissue from the nine birds showed later on Friday they had not been infected. Veterinary chiefs are jittery because the virus is highly infectious and inexplicably spreads over large distances. Nearly 100,000 head of poultry have been gassed and burned in the German state since the virus crossed the border from the Netherlands.

■ Kosovo
War-crimes charge dropped
UN authorities in Kosovo corrected themselves Friday, saying a person they arrested a day earlier was not being charged for war crimes as they had said initially, but for a double murder and attempted murder. "We want to emphasise he is not charged or investigated, as previously said, for war crimes," Andrea Angeli, spokesperson for the UN mission in Kosovo said. Angeli explained that Driton Kukaj was now being accused of participating in an ambush, in which a bodyguard to the mayor of the town Istog was killed along with a family member, and a third person escaped unharmed.

■ Zambia
President refuses executions
Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has refused to sign execution orders for prisoners condemned to death because he is a Christian, a government spokesman said Friday. Home Affairs Minister Ronnie Shikapwasha said Mwanawasa informed him in writing that convicts on death row were now serving life sentences. They include over 50 soldiers involved in the October 1997 failed coup attempt. This is the first time a Zambian head of state has refused to sign execution orders. N'gande Mwanajiti, executive director of Inter African Network for Human Rights welcomed Mwanawasa's decision and called for the abolition of the death penalty in the country.

■ United States
Bungled raid kills woman
A 57-year-old woman died of an apparent heart attack after police detonated a flash grenade and handcuffed her during a raid on the wrong apartment. Alberta Spruill, a longtime city employee, was pronounced dead on Friday about an hour after a dozen heavily armed officers broke into her home at dawn. "We're deeply saddened," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. "It's a tragedy. This should not have happened." An informant said that Spruill's sixth-floor Harlem apartment was being used by an armed drug dealer to stash cocaine and heroin, police officials said.
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